I was playing a game against NickRice the other week. He'd put a Leman Russ company on top of a hill but was disappointed that he couldn't use his elevated position to shoot at targets behind buildings and woods etc. The hills we where using just weren't that high.

This got me thinking about hills in epic. Basically hills have no effect except as something to hide behind. There is no advantage to be had ontop of a hill, it might as well be completely flat, unless you have really tall hill models.

This I've always thought is a bit of a shame since it doesn't reflect real life battles very well.

So here;'s some thoughts:

Hills grant popup: A unit on the the top of a hill is cosidered to be popped for drawing line of sight. Thus, If intervening terrain is closer to the shooter than the target then then both have LOS to each other.

Naturally, this won't be of much benifit to units with short range firepower, since the intervening terrain would have to be very close to the hill (a town nestled at the base for example) Long range shooters 75cm+ would probably get a real advantage though.

Units on a hill on overwatch or sustained fire orders are at -1 to hit
I'm no military expert but what I do know is that often tanks will deploy on a ridge or the crest of a hill with thier hull behind the crest and their barrels just sticking over the top. The -1 to hit mod is inteneded to reflect this. No fiddly LOS need to be taken to see if a tank is partially obscured and hull down: If it's on the hill and it's on OW or SF then the unit gets the modifier. If not on OW or SF then use the hull down rules as normal,

Note that for infanty, -1 on a hill on overwatch is not in addition to -1 infanty get for being on plain old overwatch.

To claim either of these benefits, units most be on the very top of a hill, not on the slope (for sloped hills) or lower level (for stepped hills)

With these rules in place, it might give some real incentive for getting on top of hills - as feels natural.

what do you guys think?

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[url=http://tinyurl.com/bott2015][img]http://i62.tinypic.com/205fcow.jpg[/img][/url]

In a real military world, having the high ground is preferable, but you still cant shoot stuff you cannot see. Even small buildings are able to hide troops and equipment. In reality, if you have the high ground you shell the town into dust.

It's not shooting stuff in terrain that's the problem, it's shooting over terrain to units far behind it. Most hill models are not tall enough. They're just mere bumps barely taller than a building!

What my idea attempts to do is make hills seem much taller by simply utilising the popup rules.

Currently, a unit with popup has far more effectiveness than a unit on a hill because it's hight is abstracted, while the height of a hill is taken literally, and is in almost all cases utterly ineffectual.

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[url=http://tinyurl.com/bott2015][img]http://i62.tinypic.com/205fcow.jpg[/img][/url]

You need taller hills  

what would be appropriate imo is to give units that are on higher ground +1 for assault resolution. Fighting up a hill is just a pain in the ass.

But on the other hand the same could be said for defenders in cover/ruins etc. - so maybe forget about it  

bg,

I wouldn't do modifiers if I were you.  It'll get messy in a hurry.  Go low tech and set up a third of the board with a big piece of foam board or books underneath.  Drape a 8 x 4 piece of felt over it and add terrain as necessary.  The end result is one part of the table will be 2-4 inches higher than the rest of the board which, when combined with your regular terrain, will have the high-ground-attributes you desire.

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author of Syncing Forward and other stories...

It's a dog-eat-dog world, and I've got my Milkbone underwear on.

Reasonable enough for scenario type play - but for tournament style I would like several usefully tall hills;  At least one in each players half, but not on the edge of the table - thus providing the usual  something-to-hide-behind facility (very important) as well as a height facility.

More importantly I want to achieve this with the terrain materials available to the various players in my play group and potentially at tournament.

I think my popup convention just about handles that.
But being of critical in mind, I have now to consider to ask if it's bad idea.

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[url=http://tinyurl.com/bott2015][img]http://i62.tinypic.com/205fcow.jpg[/img][/url]

Hey, if it works for you, then do the pop up.  I just see a tournament setting precisely the environment NOT to introduce a new artifical mechanic to the game.  Felt mats are perfect for hiding terrain that is the right size but doesn't match the board (ex. 40K terrain).  You can stack stuff up easily enough and books are abundant.  If you keep the terrain at a gaming store just have some cheap, uncarved foam blocks in storage.  The felt mats are great because they 'grab' the terrain underneath and hold their shape.  Check out the Dark Eldar battle report and you can see how we were able to create smooth rolling hills that didn't sag during the game.

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author of Syncing Forward and other stories...

It's a dog-eat-dog world, and I've got my Milkbone underwear on.

Some rulesets (notably Spearhead) use a Hull-down to-hit modifier when a tank unit is on a hill. This works well with turreted tank-type vehicles. In fact, the Epic rules include this modifier, see page 17. The Spearhead rule says that you get this modifier if you are on the hill and the other guy is to your front. The idea is that our wargaming hills do not model military crests and the like too well, so the units on the hill are assumed to use the somewhat abstracted terrain to their advantage.

Me and Bombot always used to play hills can see over everything to give them some tactical value and make hills worth fighting over. Our reasoning was that the hills were "really" much higher than whatever we were using to represent them. Scale in epic is quite confused as it is, so it didn't take a great leap of the imagination. (mini-titans, elastic distances, old-school thunderhawks...the list goes on!)

Alansa's pop-up idea seems like a good one, certainly better than sees over everything since it leverages off an existing rule (well, modification to the rules - actually the original skimmer rules are a bit like my hill rules!    )

I also like the idea of just using bigger hills! Unfortunately it's just not that practical when you take into account storage and transport issues.

Maybe some kind of penalty for an assaulting unit trying to attack up-hill?

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Set phasers on "fun"!

Also, bigger hills need wider bases (unless they are very steep) meaning you can't have so many on the table.

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[url=http://tinyurl.com/bott2015][img]http://i62.tinypic.com/205fcow.jpg[/img][/url]

Sleeping on any kind of slope...you roll.

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author of Syncing Forward and other stories...

It's a dog-eat-dog world, and I've got my Milkbone underwear on.

Lol you sound almost like you've lived it Rug - with bitter memories!

Finding cover on the forward slope of a hill is difficult.
Avoiding silhouettes when crossing the brow of a hill is difficult.
Avoiding shadow can be problematic depending on orientation.

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[url=http://tinyurl.com/bott2015][img]http://i62.tinypic.com/205fcow.jpg[/img][/url]